I knocked up a small PHP script that grabs the backend status, finds what is being recorded or watched, compares with the previous run, and sends a message to twitter using wget.

To use it, grab the script, change the username/password variables, chmod +x it, and then add it to your “Startup Applications” or equivalent if you’re not using Ubuntu.

I’ve made a little markup system so that the whole postit can be a link, and the time and location can be overridden (child protection malarky – can’t just put a time and location for some things!)

It’s all written in PHP, using the GD graphics features to put the text on a background image. If you’re interested in the code, comment, and I’ll give it to you (if you link to me!)

First, go to about:config (just type it in the address bar and hit enter)

Then filter for “origin”.

Change “security.fileuri.strict_origin_policy” to false.

You should now be able to use local javascript files.

By applying a “Newsletters” label on GMail to all automated messages by filtering messages, I can now see how many unread emails I have, then subtract the number of unread newsletters I have, and flash the ambient light that number of times.

Grab getGoogleMail.sh, change the usernames and passwords, and change “Newsletters” to whatever your google label is. Then use the $count variable to do whatever you want.

What I really want is a text message telling me which junctions on the M27 and M3 are delayed and roughly what their speed are. While I don’t actually use the motorways to get to work, if they’re gridlocked, the surrounding country-roads tend to also be gridlocked, so this should work. My house already texts me thanks to twitter, so that part of the system is easy, and has the bonus of other people can use it.

After discovering a site that gives average speeds between junctions, cogs started to whir. Unfortunately the site doesn’t provide a nice feed, but that wasn’t going to stop me.

A few hours of Java hacking later, @hants_motorway was born.

Every 20 minutes, between 7am-10am and 4pm-7pm, the speeds of each junction between J2-J12 on M27 and J4-J14 on M3 are recorded in a database, and compared against the speed of that junction at that time in the previous month. If it is less than 45%, it assumes there’s a delay and puts a message on Twitter. When the list of junctions delayed change, or the delays end, another message is put on Twitter.

I’ve setup my personal account (@ejellard) to follow @hants_motorway and to text me each update.

I’m hoping that this means that those driving from the Southampton area to some location near Winchester won’t have to sit in stupid amounts of traffic. I obviously can’t guarantee it’s accuracy, and no doubt my house will have a power-cut or network outage the one day it would be useful, but it shouldn’t give false-positives (or negatives, depending which way you look at it). Let me know what you think, and if there are any better ways of doing this.

And purely because I can, here’s an “interesting” graph of road speeds of different junctions along the M3:

And the M27:

Now to actually create an album.  Yes, pretty easy. Upload a file, not so easy, but doable.  Get that file to be shown – next to impossible.  This is the worlds most convoluted software I have ever seen!  To get a photo to be shown, you first have to syncronise, then go and create thumbnails – but wait, by default the synchronise does a dummy run, so go back and tick a tick-box.  Grr, really not usable.  So, I tried looking at the documentation (which goes against my beliefs of websites should never, ever, need any help – they should be usable) and even that is appauling!  It’s a wiki with a very poor navigation structure (if there is any structure), so impossible to find anything useful.  Turn to the forums to find others having the same problem, and being told to read the instructions…

Right, rant over, software uninstalled.

Plogger was the next on the list, the demo looked clean and simple – just what I needed (PHP/MySQL based).  Installed it in a couple of minutes, saw a test album had been created for me so uploaded a photo and job done – it was there!  Then spent the next hour cropping and adjusting the photos, uploaded them, and bob’s your uncle, I have a nice and simple photo gallery for the scouts!  The styling is very minimal, it’s designed to be part of a larger site, although there is one style that’s a little less minimal which I’ve gone for as there’s no “larger site” for this.

So steer clear of piwigo, and let me know if you have any recommendations…

So, you’ve probably gathered that I’ll happily reinvent the wheel many times over, but hopefully for a good result. Magic Hat is very dynamic and has lots of complicated features that I don’t think would have been feasible to get working in something like WordPress without having to learn and change most of WP.

I’ve setup the Magic Hat forums to tweet every time someone posts, but I didn’t really want to use tinyurl/bit.ly as I’d like to keep magichat.co.uk in the links.  So, here’s some code that creates the smallest possible hash.

$letters = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
function getHash($i) {
        $string = "";
        while ($i >= strlen($letters)) {
                $string = substr($letters, $i % strlen($letters), 1) . $string;
                $i = floor($i / strlen($letters));
        }
        $string = substr($letters, $i, 1) . $string;
        return $string;
}
function getNumFromHash($string) {
        $letters = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
        $k = 0;
        $count = 0;
        for ($j = strlen($string) - 1; $j >= 0; $j--) {
                $letter = substr($string, $j, 1);
                $indexOfLetter = strpos($letters, $letter);
                $k += $indexOfLetter * pow(strlen($letters), $count);
                $count++;
        }
        return $k;
}

So, whenever I want to twitter something, I stick an entry in a database table with the URL and text contents. I grab the auto incrementing ID from the primary key, and pass it into getHash(). Then I run this:

$twitters = sql_array("SELECT id, message, link FROM twitter WHERE sent = 0 ORDER BY id");
if (count($twitters[0]) > 0) {
        foreach ($twitters as $t) {
                $linkLength = 0;
                $link = "";
                $message = $t['message'];
                if (strlen($t['link']) > 0) {
                        $link = "http://magichat.co.uk/w/".function_getHash($t['id']);
                        $linkLength = strlen($link) + 1;
                        $message = substr($message, 0, 140 - $linkLength);
                        $message .= " ".$link;
                }
                $message = urlencode($message);
                $ch = curl_init('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json');
                curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
                curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, 'status='.$message);
                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, 'magichatuk:PASSWORD');
                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 0);
                curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
                curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,10);
                $response = curl_exec($ch);
                curl_close($ch);
                sql_update("twitter", "sent = 1", "id = ".$t['id']);
        }
}

sql_array and sql_update are a couple of functions that I’ve written to do stuff with the database, and cache results etc.

The code ensures the full URL is present by shrinking the text if need be.

This line in my .htaccess file directs everything starting /w/ to tinyurl.php

RewriteRule ^w/(.+)    /tinyurl.php?hash=$1

tinyurl.php:

$string = $_GET['hash'];
$k = getNumFromHash($string);
$url = sql_result("link", "ma_twitter", "id = $k");
sql_update("ma_twitter", "hits = hits + 1", "id = $k");
header("Location:http://www.magichat.co.uk".$url);

And the job’s done! Doing it this way (without using tinyurl) means that you can jump to #anchors on the page.

See it in action at http://twitter.com/magichatuk